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Ted Berrigan takes the place of Virgil conducting the poet
Terry, in this wonderfully satirical and scatological update of Dante's Inferno,
set on the campus of the University of Essex, bringing in a wide range of
characters and reference - including many to Terry's home-town of Belfast -
in this modern survey of the twenty four great circles of hell. Terry's great
poetical gift - apart from a strong element of elegant craftsmanship in his
work - is his ability to speak both to 'the mainstream' and to 'the
experimenters', an unusual talent which works to great effect here as
elsewhere in his writing.
One of the notable facts about the University of Essex is the exceptionally
large number of poets it has spawned and its association with some of the
major names of twentieth century
British and American poetry is legendary: Donald Davie; Robert Lowell; Tom
Raworth; Jeremy Reed; Ed Dorn; Douglas Oliver; Elaine Feinstein; Tony Lopez;
Anna Mendelssohn; Kelvin Corcoran and arguably Terry himself - on the
strength of this collection - are among those who have either taught or been
students at Essex. Its early reputation for far-left politics and its
consequent high-profile reputation, whether scandalous or admirable (in
relation to its high proportion of working-class and international students)
make it a suitable place to set an update of Dante's epic masterpiece.
Terry's mix of elegant narrative and vernacular speech is a delight to read
and the book is filled with references from both popular and high culture
and, in fact, from no culture at all. Nobody, I suspect is going to pick up
all the allusions though I'm sure there are a few polymaths who will get
close and there may be those who feel a bit uneasy in approaching this book
at all in case they perceive themselves as being represented in a less than
positive light. In this sense there is a parallel with John Hartley
Williams's A Poetry Inferno
(2011) and the title is hardly accidental. Few of the participants in this
vigorous melee come out smelling of roses and that's exactly what you'd
expect in a book called Dante's Inferno.
I'm not going to provide a long commentary here - this is a short review but
hope to whet your appetite with a few choice 'clips' from this impressive and
very readable slice of modern shenanigans. If it's inevitably a dark survey
it's also a page-turner, not something typical of serious modern poetry and
especially
poetry which tips its cap towards the 'experimental' end of the spectrum. As
I've already suggested, Terry is rare in this respect as he combines this trait
with an entertainment aspect which some would probably be scornful of but which
I, for one, feel is
a triumph.
Here the
Essex Harpies twine their nests,
Whose
namesakes chased the Trojans
From the
Strophades, with prophecies of doom,
A mutant
breed, sired at Bradwell,
Where the
reactor leaks its waste
Into the
Blackwater.
Wide wings
they have, necks and faces of women,
Their feet
are clawed like falcon.
Their fat
bellies feathered.
(from
CANTO XIII)
The mixing of classical literature with common parlance is well-achieved and
adds to the brew in a manner which not all re-workings of the past manage.
Terry's commenting on the here-and-now has its scabrous side and is much the
better for it but there's also a more reflective, melancholy aspect, which
hints at the sadness of the human condition and I don't mean that to be a
clichˇ.
I stretch out
my neck to look down,
But doing so
only made me more apprehensive,
For beneath
me I could see nothing but
A city of
flames, full of fearful cries
And
lamentings, and I drew back tightening
My grip. And
then I saw what I had not
Been able to
till then: the spiral path
Of our
descent, like that of a jet coming in
To Stanstead,
that has to kill time before
The runway is
clear, and as we went down
I saw torment
heaped upon torment
Closing in on
us from every side.
The tree
spirit brought us down gently,
Before a
building that resembled a
Multi-storey
car park, and here we alighted.
Unburdened,
the ghost shot off, like an arrow from a bowstring.
(from
CANTO XVII)
You can approach this book from many levels and there's something here for
the erudite scholar as well as for the enthusiastic reader. It can't be easy
to use an existing text with such a long-lived reputation as a starting point
but Terry has done a wonderful job here, I think. The fact that both Marina
Warner and the late
Seamus Heaney feature in the back-cover tributes only add to the
commendation. This is a terrific book, a good read as well as a thoughtful
and sardonic 'polemic'.
© Steve
Spence 2014
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